The Real Story Behind the Steele Dossier

For a reporter, it’s a heart-stopping moment. You’re in an interview and suddenly a source offers up something you never expected anyone to unearth: video evidence of the president’s perverse pleasures.

“You were going to ask about the pee tape?” Glenn Simpson, the co-founder of the research firm Fusion GPS, which commissioned the infamous Steele dossier, asks me. “We’re going to screen it for you right now.” He motions to a TV on the wall of his conference room. I turn to look, taken in by Simpson’s deadpan expression and convinced for a half second that he and his partner, Peter Fritsch, somehow possess the alleged clandestine video of Russian prostitutes urinating on a bed at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Moscow for the delectation of future President Donald Trump.

But, no—he is kidding. No one has yet proved the existence of the pee tape, the most lurid allegation in a dossier that still reverberates through Washington nearly three years after its public release. is a word forever chiseled into Washington’s political lexicon. During the ongoing impeachment hearings on Capitol Hill, Devin Nunes, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, has repeatedly invoked the dossier, saying its reliance on Russian sources points to Democratic collusion